Travel Photography - Part One

13 June 2014 1:53:51 PM AEST

First, let's look at what the word Travel means: To go from one place to another, as by car, train, plane, or ship; take a trip; journey: to travel for pleasure.

So travel photography would be the way we would document and cover our journey.

Any photo that is captured during a journey could be considered a travel photo but in reality it is an image that captures the time, location, the light and scene as the photographer saw the situation.

It can take many forms; it can be part landscape, part adventure, part documentary, part street photography and part portrait photography.

So it means the genre is very open ended with no real style to it, it can be anything from a nice landscape, to a portrait of a local going about their daily life or even a local cultural event.

For capturing the best landscape photos whilst you’re traveling make sure you read our recent series on landscape photography.

Any camera can be used to photograph travel images, but a good quality camera with a good quality lens is going to give you the best results.

In order to do this make sure your camera has the following...

A quality high resolution sensor - this will give you the best colour range and detail in your shots, also important if you want to enlarge and print your favourite images when you get home.

Low light performance – When your traveling you are going to be going in places that may not have the best lighting conditions with so having a camera that has a high iso is a must , anything above 10,000 ISO would be perfect.

Versatile lens range – A camera/lens combo that has at least a 10x zoom range this will give you a very workable range when traveling.

Wide angle lens – whilst still talking about lenses, you should aim to go with a focal length that begins with at least 28mm, but something with 24mm would be even better.

Safety of your equipment when traveling is important to consider.

Make sure your equipment is insured. Travel insurance companies will generally cover your equipment for loss or damage whilst you are away. But also check with them to see if you need to have anything separately listed on your policy to make sure it is covered correctly and for its correct replacement value.

You should never try to draw attention to your equipment as this will make you more likely to be a target of thieves.

A couple of examples of how to avoid the attention that your equipment can bring is to tape over the name of the Camera on the actual camera body and strap to help hide what kind of camera it is. I have also heard of photographers covering other parts of the cameras with tape to make it look tired and ratty.

Camera bags have come a long way in recent years and now look less and less like camera bags, which helps hide the fact that you have a bag full of expensive camera equipment.

Another option for carrying your gear is to grab and old favourite and tired looking bag, then fit it out as a camera bag by buying a bag insert or getting some custom made foam inserts, this will help with making it look less like you are carrying equipment.

When you are traveling it is important to back up your images whilst you are away.

The best way to do this is to take a laptop with you with a couple of hard drives and back up regularly with a copy of images on both drives. Then always keep the two drives separate from each other, so when flying pack one in your carry on and one in your checked luggage this way you are splitting up your images and have less chance of losing both drives.

In our next post we will talk about the different suggestions of equipment to look at using when traveling.